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Effundere in Latrinam // JQR blog

posted March 10, 2017

In Pope Innocent III’s 1205 papal bull Etsi Iudeos, we read that “on the day of the Lord’s resurrection the Christian wet nurses of [Jewish] children receive the body and blood of Jesus Christ, for three days [their Jewish patrons] make them express milk into the latrine before they may nurse [the Jewish children].”

Jeremy Cohen’s lively and meticulous rereading of this bull (JQR 107.1, winter 2017) overturns its standard interpretation among Jewish historians, taking aim at the way bad habits and biases get passed among members of academic guilds. He does not exempt even himself in this micro-history of misreading, and his reconstruction offers a cleaner view into the place of the Jews in early 13th-century church doctrine.